Cindy Sheehan: Peace is Not for Wimps

I did an interview with the BBC. I
don’t like the BBC and I usually have
distasteful experiences, but it has such a huge audience, I try to swallow
my distaste and just do the interviews. Seamus, the host, didn’t disappoint
me — he was just like all the rest — combative and sensationalist.

At one point he asked me something like this: “Cindy, given the fact that
the Military Industrial Complex is so large and powerful, what kind of
impact do you think not paying your taxes has on it?”

Well, at least I can read the latest act of horror committed by my country
or its adjuncts and think to myself, “at least I didn’t fund that.” How can
one say he/she is against war and other atrocities, yet pay for them? And
Seamus was right, withholding my money and using it for good rather than
evil doesn’t seem to be slowing down the war machine even a little bit, but
what if conscientious war tax resistance were a movement and not a statement
by just a few?

After that interview with Seamus and the meeting at the Peace House in
war-torn, but healing Belfast, I received an email from one of my attorneys
who is helping me with my tax issues telling me that my hearing before a
magistrate to try and force me to comply will probably be on
April 19th in
Sacramento.

At the meeting at the Peace House, a gentleman asked me if I would go to
prison rather than pay my taxes.

I don’t want to go to prison in the
U.S.A. — that’s one of the last things in the world I want to do. I don’t think
that it will come to that, but my answer to the gentleman was, “Yes.” This
is one of the multitude of reasons why:

The other day, I saw a video report from the
BBC, not some left wing anti-Semitic,
radical news source, that told about an Israeli soldier that lined three
sisters ages four to eight up against the side of their home in Gaza and
shot them — killing two and crippling the four year old. By conservative
estimates, the
U.S. gives Israel
ten million per day for military aid. Would I rather go to prison than fund
the murder of these young girls and millions more?

That’s not a hard choice for me.

In Belfast, the British troops finally left, forced out by a combination of
non-violent protest and armed struggle.

Tax resistance is one of the most non-violent forms of resistance that I can
think of: One that can make a profound difference.

I hope we can Occupy Peace and grow the tax resistance movement to really
and non-violently make a difference.

We must ask ourselves if funding the execution of babies is something that
our moral center is comfortable with.

War tax resister Vickie Aldrich
reports that she’s getting some help from students at the University of
New Mexico law school in her fight against an
IRS
“frivolous filing” penalty:

They will argue it not in terms of my position on war taxes or the
IRS
regulations but in terms of “case law” and in relation to how the penalty
was applied. I’ll know more as time goes by. I was surprised at how much I
was relieved at this news. I was a bit disappointed that they suspect it
will take more than one semester. I fantasized that it was like a western
movie scene when the cavalry would come riding in to the rescue, the
IRS
would look up from their desks and drop everything and run shouting “look
look it’s New Mexico law students!,” “we give up.” Evidently, this is not
the case, we are not at the end, just beginning a new chapter.

New war tax resister Chris Gaunt
explains what led her to take her stand, in Iowa’s Your Weekly Paper.

Kelly Denton-Borhaug, author of U.S. War Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation, Christian activist Shane Claiborne, Jack Payden-Travers of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and Pat Hostetter Martin, are leading a public forum today in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on Stories of Conscience and Taxes in a Culture of War.

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